After many months of designing, coding, reviewing, testing and documenting, Qt 4.7.0 is finally ready for the big time. Although it's a little more than nine months since Qt's last feature release (4.6.0 on December 1, 2009), the seeds of some of the new stuff in 4.7 were sown much earlier. Indeed, many of the ideas behind the biggest new feature in Qt 4.7.0, Qt Quick, were born more than two years ago, not long after Qt 4.4 was released

yes and no, even if the "end result" could look similar to animations done in flash or javafx, the fundamentals of the language are pretty peculiar: it's quite heavily based on the declarative description of a state machine. that allows to do cool animations in the ui leaving the codebase pretty simple and elegant (and still human, and non coder readable)
the only thing as far i'm aware that shares a good degree of similarity with it (as a general paradigm, not implementation) is the efl framework from Enlightenment